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Album Review
by SashaS
22-10-2001
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| Sonic guerilla |
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23 Skidoo: 'Seven Songs / Urban Gamelan'
(Ronin)
23 Skidoo reissue early albums to remind us where the future was forged
A viewpoint: The 1980s are rightly considered to be a decade that taste did forsake, song- and fashion-wise but doesn’t deter saddoes longing for it and, nostalgia generally being big business, flock to the package tours that include Kim Wilde, Human League, T-Pau and Duran Duran. In face of such sell-out tastelessness we have some brilliant leftovers from that time, Depeche Mode and (recently reformed) 23 Skidoo and Soft Cell, to name but a trio, that are as relevant as, let’s see, Starsailor.
Another viewpoint: Jimmy Durante once said about rock, “There’s only three notes and two of them are wrong.” Well, perhaps it is true but there were also bands that played all three notes ‘wrong’, such as Throbbing Gristle, thus making it unlistenable or two-and-a-half, alike artists A Certain Ratio, The Pop Group, Cabaret Voltaire and, in particular, 23 Skidoo.
The interest in the last-named has increased since the band re-emerged last year with an album and selected live dates. What they did twenty years ago was to be anti-consumer’s pop, countering the synth-driven fantasies and big-haired chart occupiers who all adopted Abba dress sense. 23 Skidoo were an alternative to it, brutally merging funk and punk that let your head spin without any (il/legal) substances. Now, two albums that haven’t been available since the late 1980s make a welcome return.
23 Skidoo were a bunch of martial arts and William Burroughs fanatics who realised in 1981 that the energy of punk could be combined with tribal percussion, hip-hop and all manner of trance-inducing funk. Their debut album ‘Seven Songs’ proves the theory sound to make this music appear contemporary even now. Although recorded in three days only by two members of proto-industrialists Throbbing Gristle, ‘Seven Songs’ still sounds vital today with its combination of paranoid ambience and masterfully ruthless grooves.
They followed it in 1984's with ‘Urban Gamelan’ that is a beast of more split-personalities. The new ingredient of reggae has been added to the previous mixture and initially appears to be a tad more dated than the debut. The second half of the album sees Skidoo move into an ‘industrial’ zone, a lot of scrap-metal ‘playing’ going on, that recalls spirit behind works of Test Department or Einsturzende Neubauten. It might sound a bit distant (disturbing, perhaps) at first but it is actually peculiarly enchanting in its enthusiasm to expend rock’s vocabulary. As the title suggests, the real gamelan.
These hybrids have been influential and even The Chemical Brothers borrowed some of ‘Coup’ for ‘Block Rocking Beats’. Maybe they should have looked at this couple for even more intriguing tonal solutions.
8/10
SashaS
7-10-2004
23 Skidoo’s ‘Seven Songs/Urban Gamelan’ is released 22 Oct. 2001 on Ronin
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